andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1415 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Two news items. 1. A couple people pointed me to the uncovering of another fraudulent Dutch psychology researcher—this time it was Dirk Smeesters, rather than Diederik Stapel . It’s hard to keep these guys straight—they all pretty much have the same names and do the same things. Stapel and Smeesters also seem to live in the same postmodernist/business-school nexus: left-wing enough to not care about truth if it confirms their social theories, right-wing enough to not care as long as they’re getting paid enough. In the comments to the Retraction Watch post, Richard Gill writes , “it looks to me [Gill] like Smeesters was subjected to medieval torture and confessed.” Medieval torture, huh? I haven’t seen Holy Grail in many years but I recall that’s pretty rough stuff, of the sort that even John Yoo might think twice about. I followed the links and didn’t see what the torture was, but I have to admit I didn’t even try to read the Dutch documents. On the upside, Gill follow
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1 A couple people pointed me to the uncovering of another fraudulent Dutch psychology researcher—this time it was Dirk Smeesters, rather than Diederik Stapel . [sent-3, score-0.167]
2 Stapel and Smeesters also seem to live in the same postmodernist/business-school nexus: left-wing enough to not care about truth if it confirms their social theories, right-wing enough to not care as long as they’re getting paid enough. [sent-5, score-0.186]
3 In the comments to the Retraction Watch post, Richard Gill writes , “it looks to me [Gill] like Smeesters was subjected to medieval torture and confessed. [sent-6, score-0.404]
4 I followed the links and didn’t see what the torture was, but I have to admit I didn’t even try to read the Dutch documents. [sent-9, score-0.215]
5 On the upside, Gill follows up with “it seems like he did indeed have something serious to confess to, since all of his data is missing and no-one else ever saw any of it”—so maybe the medieval system worked in this case! [sent-10, score-0.192]
6 Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a recent argument by Fabio Rojas that retractions are good for science. [sent-13, score-0.271]
7 But, as Thomas points out : These retractions come after a great deal of criticism . [sent-14, score-0.328]
8 Not only is the scholarship that is required to force a retraction difficult and time consuming to carry out, it often meets resistance from peers and editors. [sent-17, score-0.338]
9 My impression is that non-retraction is the norm, and retraction is considered exceptional. [sent-20, score-0.224]
10 Just as we would applaud a person who rescues someone who has fallen on to the train tracks but would not criticize someone who does not perform the dangerous rescue, many academics see retractions as admirable but non-retractions as the usual behavior. [sent-21, score-0.379]
11 Thomas points to the work of Karl Weick, who has not been accused of faking his research results but has copied chunks of another’s work in his papers without attribution. [sent-22, score-0.257]
12 Unlike the utterly discredited Stapel and Smeesters, Weick has followed the Wegman strategy of brazening it out and brushing aside all accusations of plagiarism. [sent-23, score-0.117]
13 What Weick, Wegman, Stapel, and Smeesters all have in common, though, is that they are big shots within their fields but nobodies outside. [sent-24, score-0.186]
14 Sometimes it seems that the people close to these offenders just don’t want to hear the bad news, and outsiders just don’t care. [sent-26, score-0.081]
15 I agree, though, with Rojas that retractions are good. [sent-27, score-0.271]
16 One challenge, though, is that uncovering the problem and forcing the retraction is a near-thankless job. [sent-28, score-0.391]
17 That’s one reason I don’t mind if Uri Simonsohn is treated as some sort of hero or superstar for uncovering multiple cases of research fraud. [sent-29, score-0.223]
18 Some people might feel there’s something unseemly about Simonsohn doing this (see several of the comments to the link at the very top of this post), just as some defenders of Karl Weick mocked Basbøll for going to the trouble of exposing a decades-old plagiarism. [sent-30, score-0.286]
19 If retractions are a good thing, and fraudsters and plagiarists are not generally going to retract on their own, then somebody’s going to have to do the hard work of discovering, exposing, and confronting scholarly misconduct. [sent-32, score-0.696]
20 So, yes, I think it’s fair enough for the Uri Simonsohns of the world to get a little fame and fortune in return for their admirable efforts. [sent-34, score-0.171]
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Introduction: Two news items. 1. A couple people pointed me to the uncovering of another fraudulent Dutch psychology researcher—this time it was Dirk Smeesters, rather than Diederik Stapel . It’s hard to keep these guys straight—they all pretty much have the same names and do the same things. Stapel and Smeesters also seem to live in the same postmodernist/business-school nexus: left-wing enough to not care about truth if it confirms their social theories, right-wing enough to not care as long as they’re getting paid enough. In the comments to the Retraction Watch post, Richard Gill writes , “it looks to me [Gill] like Smeesters was subjected to medieval torture and confessed.” Medieval torture, huh? I haven’t seen Holy Grail in many years but I recall that’s pretty rough stuff, of the sort that even John Yoo might think twice about. I followed the links and didn’t see what the torture was, but I have to admit I didn’t even try to read the Dutch documents. On the upside, Gill follow
2 0.39556482 1603 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-03-Somebody listened to me!
Introduction: Several months ago, I wrote : One challenge, though, is that uncovering the problem [of scientific fraud] and forcing the retraction is a near-thankless job. That’s one reason I don’t mind if Uri Simonsohn is treated as some sort of hero or superstar for uncovering multiple cases of research fraud. Some people might feel there’s something unseemly about Simonsohn doing this . . . OK, fine, but let’s talk incentives. If retractions are a good thing, and fraudsters and plagiarists are not generally going to retract on their own, then somebody’s going to have to do the hard work of discovering, exposing, and confronting scholarly misconduct. If these discoverers, exposers, and confronters are going to be attacked back by their targets (which would be natural enough) and they’re going to be attacked by the fraudsters’ friends and colleagues (also natural) and even have their work disparaged by outsiders who think they’re going too far, then, hey, they need some incentives in the othe
3 0.26692373 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
Introduction: This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. Some of Weick’s articles included the material with no reference to Holub; others referred to Holub but without indicating that Weick had essentially done a direct copy of Holub’s writing. The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lo
4 0.19706318 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”
Introduction: As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion ( here and here ) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years. Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation. A full discussion follows. 1. The lost Hungarian soldiers Thomas Basbøll (who has the unusual (to me) job of “writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School) has been
5 0.17471169 989 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-03-This post does not mention Wegman
Introduction: A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. I wanted to give you an update on the Diederik Stapel case. I’d rather not see my name on the blog if you would elaborate on this any further. It is long but worth the read I guess. I’ll first give you the horrible details which will fill you with a mixture of horror and stupefied amazement at Stapel’s behavior. Then I’ll share Stapel’s abject apology, which might make you feel sorry for the guy. First the amazing story of how he perpetrated the fraud: There has been an interim report delivered to the rector of Tilburg University. Tilburg University is cooperating with the university of Amsterdam and of Groningen in this case. The results are pretty severe, I provide here a quick and literal translation of some comments by the chairman of the investigation committee. This report is publicly available on the university webpage (along with some other things of interest) but in Dutch: What
7 0.137655 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
8 0.11375685 728 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-24-A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case
9 0.1113934 2039 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-25-Harmonic convergence
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20 0.087670796 1588 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-23-No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
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1 0.92643338 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
Introduction: This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. Some of Weick’s articles included the material with no reference to Holub; others referred to Holub but without indicating that Weick had essentially done a direct copy of Holub’s writing. The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lo
Introduction: Two news items. 1. A couple people pointed me to the uncovering of another fraudulent Dutch psychology researcher—this time it was Dirk Smeesters, rather than Diederik Stapel . It’s hard to keep these guys straight—they all pretty much have the same names and do the same things. Stapel and Smeesters also seem to live in the same postmodernist/business-school nexus: left-wing enough to not care about truth if it confirms their social theories, right-wing enough to not care as long as they’re getting paid enough. In the comments to the Retraction Watch post, Richard Gill writes , “it looks to me [Gill] like Smeesters was subjected to medieval torture and confessed.” Medieval torture, huh? I haven’t seen Holy Grail in many years but I recall that’s pretty rough stuff, of the sort that even John Yoo might think twice about. I followed the links and didn’t see what the torture was, but I have to admit I didn’t even try to read the Dutch documents. On the upside, Gill follow
3 0.89262021 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
4 0.88671476 400 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-08-Poli sci plagiarism update, and a note about the benefits of not caring
Introduction: A recent story about academic plagiarism spurred me to some more general thoughts about the intellectual benefits of not giving a damn. I’ll briefly summarize the plagiarism story and then get to my larger point. Copying big blocks of text from others’ writings without attribution Last month I linked to the story of Frank Fischer, an elderly professor of political science who was caught copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. Apparently there’s some dispute about whether this constitutes plagiarism. On one hand, Harvard’s policy is that “in academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.” On the other hand, several of Fischer’s colleagues defend him by saying, “Mr. Fischer sometimes used the words of other authors. . . ” They also write: The essence of plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as
5 0.88440233 1568 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-That last satisfaction at the end of the career
Introduction: I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named Kip Litton who fradulently invented a side career for himself as a sub-3-hour marathoner. What was amazing was not so much that Litton lied about his accomplishments but, rather, the huge efforts that he undertook to support these lies. He went to faraway cities to not run marathons. He fabricated multiple personas on running message boards. He even invented an entire marathon and made up a list of participants. This got me thinking about Ed Wegman (sorry!), the statistician who got tangled in a series of plagiarism scandals . As with Litton, once Wegman was caught once, energetic people looked at the records and
6 0.8839246 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
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9 0.84061712 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
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11 0.82150656 901 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-12-Some thoughts on academic cheating, inspired by Frey, Wegman, Fischer, Hauser, Stapel
12 0.81555474 1324 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-16-Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman
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1 0.9225179 214 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-17-Probability-processing hardware
Introduction: Lyric Semiconductor posted: For over 60 years, computers have been based on digital computing principles. Data is represented as bits (0s and 1s). Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. A processor steps through many of these operations serially in order to perform a function. However, today’s most interesting problems are not at all suited to this approach. Here at Lyric Semiconductor, we are redesigning information processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities: from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language. As a result, many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will soon run in just one Lyric processor, providing 1,000x efficiencies in cost, power, and size. Om Malik has some more information, also relating to the team and the business. The fundamental idea is that computing architectures work deterministically, even though the world is fundamentally stochastic.
Introduction: Two news items. 1. A couple people pointed me to the uncovering of another fraudulent Dutch psychology researcher—this time it was Dirk Smeesters, rather than Diederik Stapel . It’s hard to keep these guys straight—they all pretty much have the same names and do the same things. Stapel and Smeesters also seem to live in the same postmodernist/business-school nexus: left-wing enough to not care about truth if it confirms their social theories, right-wing enough to not care as long as they’re getting paid enough. In the comments to the Retraction Watch post, Richard Gill writes , “it looks to me [Gill] like Smeesters was subjected to medieval torture and confessed.” Medieval torture, huh? I haven’t seen Holy Grail in many years but I recall that’s pretty rough stuff, of the sort that even John Yoo might think twice about. I followed the links and didn’t see what the torture was, but I have to admit I didn’t even try to read the Dutch documents. On the upside, Gill follow
Introduction: Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected
4 0.89149648 853 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-14-Preferential admissions for children of elite colleges
Introduction: Jenny Anderson reports on a discussion of the practice of colleges preferential admission of children of alumni: [Richard] Kahlenberg citing research from his book “Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions” made the case that getting into good schools matters — 12 institutions making up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population produced 42 percent of government leaders and 54 percent of corporate leaders. And being a legacy helps improve an applicant’s chances of getting in, with one study finding that being a primary legacy — the son or daughter of an undergraduate alumnus or alumna — increases one’s chance of admission by 45.1 percent. I’d call that 45 percent but I get the basic idea. But then Jeffrey Brenzel of the Yale admissions office replied: “We turn away 80 percent of our legacies, and we feel it every day,” Mr. Brenzel said, adding that he rejected more offspring of the school’s Sterling donors than he accepted this year (
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Introduction: My cobloggers sometimes write about “Politics Everywhere.” Here’s an example of a political writer taking something that’s not particularly political and trying to twist it into a political context. Perhaps the title should be “political journalism everywhere”. Michael Kinsley writes : Scientists have discovered a spinal fluid test that can predict with 100 percent accuracy whether people who already have memory loss are going to develop full-fledged Alzheimer’s disease. They apparently don’t know whether this test works for people with no memory problems yet, but reading between the lines of the report in the New York Times August 10, it sounds as if they believe it will. . . . This is truly the apple of knowledge: a test that can be given to physically and mentally healthy people in the prime of life, which can identify with perfect accuracy which ones are slowly going to lose their mental capabilities. If your first instinct is, “We should outlaw this test” or at lea
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